The present invention relates to a new and distinct cultivar of flowering dogwood, which is resistant to powdery mildew and has supernumerary bracts. This dogwood is botanically known as Cornus florida L. and hereinafter referred to by the following cultivar name: ‘Appalachian Joy’.
This new dogwood cultivar was discovered in a field planting of approximately 1,100,000 C. florida seedlings in Decherd, Tenn. in 1995. ‘Appalachian Joy’ is a supernumerary bracted (more than four bracts), white flowering dogwood, which, to the knowledge of the inventors, is superior to most other cultivars of flowering dogwood and similar to ‘Karen's Appalachian Blush’ (U.S. Plant Pat. No. 13,165 P2), ‘Kay's Appalachian Mist’ (U.S. Plant Pat. No. 13,098 P2) and ‘Jean's Appalachian Snow’ (U.S. Plant Pat. No. 13,099 P2) with respect to powdery mildew resistance. Asexual reproduction of ‘Appalachian Joy’ by terminal cuttings harvested at the Tennessee Agricultural Experiment Station in Knoxville, Tenn. and grafting of axillary buds onto seedling rootstocks have shown that the unique features of this new dogwood cultivar are stable and reproduced true-to-type in successive generations.